group show43 minbilingual (en + fr)

Youngnesse is about that typical state of youth torn between utopic naivety and nihilistic disenchantment. When it’s unclear whether to shout, protest, hide or flee, the only weapon left is our energy.

Created OFFTA 2016, Youngnesse is a reflection on the political energy of youth. Dance, theater, music, performance, visual arts, writing and theory converge to outline the portrait of a generation galvanized by the possibility of change through collective action. But as the apparatus of control is sharpened and the reactionaries monopolize popular discourse, what realistic futures can we still imagine?

While the show explores the despair and anger brought about by the physical and symbolic repression of marginal ideas, it also seeks to celebrate the invention and innovation proposed by the youths. Influenced by the energy involved in political action, the physical and visual language of Youngnesse searches for viable new lifeforms, new (wobbly) possibilities to be built.

Montreal Technical Kidman’s original score and live performance anchors the show in an obvious tension. The extensive presence of the lights, all in saturated colors, disjoints reality and propels the representation to a certain abstraction, to the communication of sensitive impressions. The show is interested in the shifting and the unstable, in images of utopias that crumble as quickly as they rise.

Built from a queer and feminist viewpoint, Youngnesse is also a space for a transhistorical conversation with other figures and images of youth resistance, for the most part forgotten by official history. Between failure and rebellion, Youngnesse is a corrosive, feverish and incandescent creation, a response to the gloom of an unsustainable status quo.

Youngnesse was produced by projets hybris and presented as part of OFFTA festival. It also benefited from the support of LA SERRE – arts vivants. The show was created thanks to residencies at the Church of Notre-Dame-des-Prairies and at Hexagram UQAM.